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Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
Without essential funds we won't meet climate change targets. The lucrative oil industry has money to spare, so why not tax it? | Photo by arbyreed via Flickr
Many people forget that the basic principles for the Copenhagen negotiations were set long ago at the Earth Summit in 1992. Rich countries were supposed to go first, fastest and furthest, and pay to help others follow in the footsteps. They failed in every single aspect. Consequently, all they can do now is beg, grovel and implore the major low income countries – the likes of Brazil, India and China – to participate willingly, and in good faith.
Of course, it’s not that simple. The “Why should we, when you didn’t and still aren’t?” position may feel smugly strong to negotiators from the global south. But, it needs to be used with extreme caution. Played with too much zeal, while living on the frontline of climate change, they might find that the house of economic development which they hope to move into has burned down long before they get there.
Without a genuine, global commitment to prevent an accumulation of greenhouse gases that is likely to push us over a 2C temperature rise, we could be giving a whole new meaning to the idea of a “scorched earth” policy.
It’s all too easy to imagine a carbon stand-off that has tragic, violent consequences. Western consumers are repeatedly told by their politicians that little matters if China doesn’t play ball. Meanwhile, China views the nihilistic inaction of western societies with a shrug, and keeps building coal-fired power stations. Small behaviour changes happen in the United States, a bit more renewable energy comes on tap, but the bigger policy stays in place: the real fireworks of using the world’s largest military to control declining oil supplies.
The latter gets sustained by its own weirdly self-supporting logic. Since becoming oil-dependent in the early 20th century, the dominant superpower’s military might is used to ensure the fuel supplies that, in turn, keep its own military functioning and mobile. Up to the first world war, it was the British and their navy. Afterwards, it was the US with its air, land and naval forces.
It’s possibly the greatest energy inefficiency we have, not to mention the way that this military “oil protection racket” also removes the incentive for energy alternatives to develop.
In a single year (2007) the US military spent over $12bn on fuel, using the equivalent of 363,000 barrels of oil per day. It is thought to be the biggest institutional buyer of oil in the world. To put those numbers into perspective, it means that just one nation’s military fuel use was almost double that another entire nation, Ireland.
With so much locked into the continuing use and extraction of oil and coal, what will it take for everyone to raise their sights?
The European Union’s murky statement that developing countries would need €100bn per year by 2020 to tackle climate change, but without being very clear how much would come from where, was less than inspiring. Those who remember the 1992 Earth Summit might get a sense of déjà vu, as back then the summit concluded that $125bn new money from rich to poor countries would be needed annually to implement its agreements, virtually none of which was forthcoming. And let’s not pretend that, even during the global recession, the money is not out there.
The oil company BP may have just been hit with a record $87m fine for safety failings at its US, Texas City refinery, but it still managed a massive $5bn profit in just the third quarter of 2009.
If radical steps are not taken when the climatic conditions on which civilisation depends are under threat, when will they be? Why not, quite seriously, impose a near-100% tax on the profits of the oil majors for the next five years? All the proceeds could then be invested into both beginning the great low-carbon transition at home, and delivering the financial resources without which a meaningful Copenhagen deal will not be agreed. At a stroke, it would generate the vast majority of the funds that most say is essential. We’d also be able to save billions in that other area quite rightly referred to as “unproductive expenditure”, the military.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
Could the Conservatives be the party to ditch economic growth as a policy and oversee the change our climate needs?
There are only seven more annual political conference seasons to go before the world enters a new, far more dangerous phase of unpredictable global warming, based on the risk categories of climate scientists.
That means we should already be able to see genuine solutions emerging in the debates and speeches echoing around the nation’s conference capitals of Brighton, Bournemouth and Manchester. It also means that whoever is successfully elected to form the next government in 2010, they will almost certainly be in power during the period when the fate of the atmosphere is settled.
Except, perhaps, during wartime, history rarely offers up such a definitive performance indicator for a government. But here, for better or worse, the words, “it happened on your watch” will be carved, probably in coal, on their headstone.
New research from the Hadley Centre, part of the government’s own Met Office, set the scene for the political challenge. It warns that we should now plan for the possibility of a 4C temperature rise by 2060. This is far beyond the maximum 2C rise considered a maximum safe threshold before the environmental dominoes start to fall.
On 25 September, the Friday before the Labour party conference began, the world went into ecological debt for the year, beginning to consume more resources and produce more waste than the planet could handle.
The challenge couldn’t be clearer. Bad accounting, poor risk assessment and profligate behaviour nearly destroyed the global financial system. It threatens to do the same to a climate conducive to civilisation. It’s not reform that the next government must oversee, but paradigm shift.
Yet in the last few weeks, the siren voices for a return to business as usual have been getting louder. We need bonuses back, says the City, although they never really went away, to get and keep the best talent. But that was hardly a good strategy last time, when the “best talent” on bonuses wrought chaos. The Confederation of British Industry says recovery depends on cutting back regulation. But an absence of appropriate regulation is the slippery slope down which the economy and environment slide. Others call for another wave of no-strings bailouts for the fossil fuel-intensive car industry. These voices, effectively, are telling the survivors of a sinking ship to leave their lifeboats and climb back on board.
As the Conservative party takes energy from Labour’s disarray and disheartenment is there any sign that they might do the seemingly unthinkable, and consider radical economic redesign to prevent what happened to the banking system from happening to the climate system?
On one hand, there is a disturbing and furtive creep of old vested interests. Big money, big business, old school connections looking to return to their comfort zone after more than a decade of feeling culturally uncomfortable with a Labour government. Regressive tax, more binge consumerism and dirty and weakly regulated industry are all poised for a potentially easy ride. Yet the Conservatives are also on a journey to distance themselves from their own past. What started as an unavoidable rebranding exercise can take on a life of its own.
David Cameron is on record as saying that well-being is as, if not more, important than growth in an economy. An increasing number of voices from Nobel economists down are pointing out the ultimate incompatibility of endless rich country economic growth with the preservation of a habitable planet. What’s interesting for the Conservatives is that ditching growth as the single, overarching economic policy obsession could well revive ways of living that they find politically appealing.
A world in which there is much less passive consumption of goods and services is a world in which we do many more things for ourselves and each other. It’s a world not of absolute but much greater self-sufficiency, at the national, local and even individual level. In other words, it’s a world in which we have much more control over our own fate. A revival of real local democracy beckons in which we are more responsible locally for our own food, energy and the reciprocal delivery of services. With 86 months to go, that doesn’t sound too bad to a public very jaded about UK politics – it may even sound infinitely preferable.
86 months and counting …
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
It could be the premise for a zeitgeist science-fiction thriller about global warming. Secrets, lies, and breathless chases along corporate corridors. Millions of pounds at stake, and ultimately millions of lives too. The United Nations suspends an auditor at the heart of a mechanism key to the success of the international climate change treaty.
In another country, a multi-million carousel fraud in the carbon emissions trading market leads to a swoop on homes in London and the South East, and multiple arrests.
A new police force is launched to investigate corporations suspected of being big greenhouse gas polluters.
This could be earnest, adrenalin-pumped entertainment, the next Syriana. But all these things are real and were revealed in the last month or shortly before. One of the more gruesome ways in which wildlife conservationists can tell the health of animal populations, like otters or badgers, is by how many roadkill get found. If more are found, it means there are more around and, ironically, must be doing well. It’s a risky analogy, but if organised crime is now taking the market for cutting carbon seriously, perhaps we are finally getting somewhere. Or, it could mean that, like so many other markets revealed in recent months as flawed, the carbon markets are just as badly designed and in a mess.
Here’s another reason why the British government would be ill-advised to perform a U-turn, and instead of cutting its own emissions directly, try to meet its commitments by carbon laundering in the supremely dodgy markets for offsetting.
But, in the UK, it could be that the phoney war over reducing emissions is finally about to end, and we will begin to get serious. Because today, as you can read about in the Guardian, a new, bold and simple campaign is being launched. It has one target: to cut emissions in the UK by 10 percent during the year 2010.
Ten percent in 2010 sounds quite catchy, but why those figures, and why is this important?
For years the government has resisted taking action on climate change that the science says is necessary. The excuse – though untested – is always that the public won’t support it – as if we’re all eager to hasten our own collective demise.
Now the opportunity is here for individuals and organisations to do something that is about more than changing lightbulbs. If successful, it could be the biggest experiment yet by a society set on positively determining its own future.
A 10 percent cut is in line with what the science suggests should be an annual target for a country like the UK. Its not to be sniffed at, but an economy entering a period of rapid transition throws up as many opportunities as it does challenges. We may fear change, but all the evidence shows that we are a highly innovative and adaptive species capable of dealing with it.
Expecting individuals alone to save the climate simply by making choices in the marketplace is not working. That much has become a common place. The necessary options are typically unavailable, either due to price or practicality. When sewage disposal in 19th centruy London was left to individuals in the marketplace, the result was open cesspitts, cholera and typhoid. There was a good reason for officialdom to mandate a new infrastructure that separated sewage from drinking water, and oversaw one of the public engineering triumphs of the age.
Perhaps the problem is that we cannot smell carbon dioxide. It was the Great Stink of 1858 that finally pushed Parliament to pass an act that would allow for the large but necessary investment needed to realise Joseph Bazalgette’s vision for a new sewage system. It took only 8 years to connect-up most of London.
The government had to hold its breath back then, in more ways than one, before it took action. But who, afterwards, would go back to how things had been before. Today they can make a leap of reason again over short-sighted intransigence, by joining the 10:10 pledge. It shouldn’t be necessary for campaigns like 10:10 to cure the government of timidity. But, with just 87 months left before odds on avoiding runaway warming shift badly against us, real leadership is, at least, coming from somewhere. Politicians are running out of excuses. If they don’t want to skulk as the bad guys in the background of the global warming movie, they should come and join the carbon reduction party.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
Is the Vesta case merely a symbolic blip, or something more interesting? Dim hope can be found in this dismal affair.
Picture the scene. It’s the beginning of the second world war. Germany’s industrial war machine is in full production and Hitler is advancing across Europe. Back in England, the government decides that the cost and planning complications of building tanks and aircraft are just too great and lets the factories – who would be willing to build if there was a demand for them – close. In compensation, it offers the firms a grant from an already existing budget to carry out research and development.
As bizarre as it sounds, a rough equivalent of this otherwise unimaginable scenario is playing itself out at the Vesta wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight – the subject of a high-profile sit-in protest by some of its workforce. The company says that the government has failed to make the domestic market happen, and so plans to shut up shop. The government, for its part, braces to endure a crushing symbolic failure just as it publishes its strategy for a transition to a low-carbon economy, and it is reported that it has offered the firm a little compensatory R&D money (£6m).
Which brings us to the strategy itself. It arrived just weeks before the clock ticks down to 88 months left until global greenhouse gas emissions tip us into a new, more dangerous phase of risk of runaway warming.
Depending on which parts of the strategy you look at (actually having one is, of course, a good start), it seems to be characterised either by some good intent, but too few resources (renewable energy), severe blind spots (peak oil and the role of communities) or a lack of vision about real alternatives for our oil-addicted economy (transport, food and farming). Through the document you can almost feel the begrudging effort of a system coming to terms with external realities that can no longer be entirely ignored or simply “news managed”.
Symbolic events in politics can sweep away even the very best intentions. But is the Vesta case merely a symbolic blip, or something more interesting? On the one hand, it couldn’t be worse. If the UK were to specialise in any form of renewable energy, it is in wind that we are particularly wealthy. The UK has access to 40% of the total wind energy resources in Europe (pdf). And the government plans for another 10,000 wind turbines to be erected by 2020.
So for the nation’s only full turbine factory to close, and for its sit-in protesters, who were trying to keep it open, to be sacked by letters tucked in with a lunch box, it’s hard to imagine a worse message being sent to the public and the marketplace. Why bail out banks to the tune of billions, to keep profit-hungry, bonus-obsessed financiers in work, who then still fail to provide necessary capital to the productive economy, and allow the foundations of our future energy system to crumble? Anyone wishing to register their thoughts can sign a petition on the No 10 website.
One dim hope filtering from this dismal affair is the way in which the environmental and trade union movements have finally found common cause over the future direction of the economy.
It is just one incident, but the message is getting through that a low-carbon economy, and the transition to it, is going to generate a vast number of new jobs. With the vast range of skills that will be needed in a world in which we will almost inevitably do many more things for ourselves, it could also represent a rebirth of useful and interesting work. It’s not just about the number of jobs, but their quality. The reason that this won’t just happen is because the government is still in thrall to market mechanisms.
As Vesta’s business decision to move production to the US shows, markets aren’t there to solve your, the nation’s or the planets problems, they are there to make profits. That is why they need to be subservient to the social and environmental objectives that we choose. On this case, at least, if you want to know the future for employment and the environment in the UK, and whether or not we are likely to avert catastrophic climate change, the answer, my friend, really is blowing in the wind.
88 months and counting…
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
They’re still out there, the deniers, but they become increasingly exotic. And excuses for inaction on global warming become stranger. One I found would have us believe that spending on wind farms was responsible globally for “killing millions” through the misallocation of resources. That came from a panellist at a public debate at one of the UK’s leading scientific establishments. Oddly, he cited no learned journals to back the claim. The same voice went further. There are no limits on the human use of natural resources, we were told, because when things run out on earth, we can always mine … asteroids.
OK, so the audience did laugh spontaneously at that point. But what makes people cling so tenaciously to denial that they would entertain ludicrous feats just to preserve the status quo, rather than embrace relatively simple changes – like switching the energy system away from fossil fuels – and in the process create jobs and greater energy security and (even if they don’t accept its reality) tackle climate change?
NASA climate scientist James Hansen (left) arrested after protesting a mountain-top coal mine in West Virginia, USA.
To push that simple change, this month one man took a big leap away from the security of the science laboratory that was once his home and got himself arrested for challenging the coal industry in the US. To be fair, James Hansen of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has a track record in standing up to authority, especially Republican administrations, but getting detained by men in uniform in the cause of climate change was a first. Soon after, a new climate bill was passed in the US.
It’s encouraging that people like Hansen are upping the ante, and it’s not difficult to see why they do it. On one hand, the month brings confirmation of how warming will drive a huge human upheaval through forced migration, and how the UK will see more flooding in winter and droughts in summer. On the other, there is news that the Met Office, responsible for much of the UK’s core work on modelling global warming, is to lose one quarter of its climate research budget, about £4.3m, after the Ministry of Defence withdrew funding, and that emissions from international shipping – not covered by international agreements for reduction – are rising.
Meanwhile, the policing of climate protests appears to grow increasingly political and repressive, in direct contradiction to exhortations to mobilise and campaign from figures like the secretary of state for energy and climate change, Ed Miliband. As the evidence on warming further hardens, any kind of coherent political response seems to flounder more elaborately.
And yet, in spite of everything and in a quite unplanned and unintentional way, the beginnings of a potentially positive and self-reinforcing spiral are dimly visible.
First, the environment comes riding in to save the economy, through various initiatives like support for wind power and home energy efficiency, that one day, added up, might look like a Green New Deal. Then the economy accidentally returns the gesture.
In 2008, a combination of high oil prices and the financial crisis saw the global economy slow down and the rate of growth of greenhouse gas emissions fall by half. They still went up, but slowed significantly.
Rich and poor countries experience such trends very differently. But the effect in some rich countries, where emissions cuts are needed first and deepest, has been interesting. Far from there being universal wailing and mortification, many have embraced the chance to work shorter weeks and take unpaid holiday. They’ve accepted cuts in disposable income because the gift of extra time has opened up new opportunities elsewhere.
In reclaiming part of their lives to do anything from spend more time with family, learn a new skill, volunteer, start a campaign or enterprise, take a walk in the woods or, indeed, study stars and asteroids, people are discovering that there is a big payback in added wellbeing. For some people at least, the recession has taught them that less really is more. As the clock ticks down to the point when, in 89 months’ time, it will no longer be “likely” that we’ll keep below the critical two-degree temperature rise, lets hope we are all quick learners.
Some of the Drax 29 at work, complete with canary. Their trial started on Monday.
Finally, its not just world-famous scientists who are putting themselves on the line legally or, indeed, literally. Last summer 29 people stopped a train containing 1,000 tonnes of coal on its way to Drax power station in Yorkshire. They stopped the train with a red flag, following standard railway safety rules, boarded it and began shovelling the coal on to the line. One was dressed as a canary – the traditional warning of dangerous pollution down a coal mine. They dropped a banner saying “Leave It in the ground”.
Like Hansen, they saw coal as the biggest danger when it came to climate change, and Drax is the biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK. All 29 were arrested and are now standing trial. They’re charged with “obstructing the railway” and they face up to two years in prison. Their trial started on Monday, but what is really on trial is whether we have the wit as a society to save ourselves from death by carbon-addled inertia.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
Ten months have passed since pointing out that we have, at best, 100 left before a new, far more dangerous phase of global warming begins. The “chatter” of concern is getting louder. But at the same time, the political system in Britain has been wracked and absorbed more by its own inadequacies than by this fundamental threat to civilisation.
Current government measures to tackling climate change are little more than fiddling while Rome burns.
The fall of the Roman Empire was due to a large extent, writes the historian Adrian Goldsworthy, to a system of government that became inward-looking and weakened by internal dissent. Gone was the singular focus from the golden days of the Republic, when a small, trusted coterie of around 1,000 administrators ran the whole empire efficiently.
In its place was a bloated, inefficient and suspicious bureaucracy of 35,000, seeking power and personal advantage. Worst of all, gripped with self-obsession, they took their eyes off the Goths at the gates, and paid a devastating price. Any similarities to actual people alive today and current political circumstances are, of course, entirely unintended and circumstantial. Goldsworthy points out that every age can project its own experience onto the Romans, which just goes to show how much they did actually do for us.
In the last ten months, support for needing to take radical action over countdown period has been far and deep. Nobel prize winners from Rajendra Pachauri of the IPCC to Wangari Maathai of the Kenyan Green Belt movement have leant support, thousands of individuals have too, along with groups whose memberships run into the many millions. Even “spiderman”, in the form of French free climber Alain Robert, has risen, literally, to the cause.
Yet, in spite of the support that investing in the great transition could give to a weakened economy, the new and additional resources being made available are paltry compared to the support given to the financial sector. Around the world, as states become more acutely aware of the threats to food and energy security stemming from our ecological overreach, they are taking action. But they are just as likely to be eyeing the natural resources of other, weaker states to meet their rising consumption, as they are to be changing consumption patterns to live within their environmental means. Land grabs for food and biofuels seem to hit the news with growing frequency.
Can new engineering such as this "cloud-seeding" really keep the planet habitable? With the clock running in the climate change countdown, post- Enlightenment faith in technological fixes may not be enough.
Technological optimism is all around us. “You cannot predict the future and unimagined solutions come along; they always have done,” we are reassured. Whenever there is a great problem, human ingenuity finds a techno-fix. Who could have predicted the chemical fertilisers for our food system, which thwarted Malthusian pessimists? The problem is, with the timeframe to act on climate change, those solutions that are meant to allow us to carry on as usual should have arrived years ago and be in place now. Now, with at best 90 months left on our clock, we have a challenge that will be a bit like the first time a child jumps from the top diving board into the swimming pool.
Both terrifying and thrilling, we need to brace ourselves for the fastest descent in the use of fossil fuels that a society like ours will ever have faced. It will need technology, behaviour change and regulations to ensure fair shares and equity on the way down. We don’t know everything that will happen on the way down. But if we get it right, I suspect that we will rediscover several important things along the path that have been largely lost or forgotten: something about the importance of community, about our own ingenuity and ability to do things for ourselves, and something also about how deeply connected to, and ultimately dependent on nature, we really are.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
The first 'green budget' is very balanced – every measure to stop climate change is balanced with one that makes it worse
Faced with worsening projections for global warming and energy security, learning that the wind turbine maker Vestas will be closing its factory on the Isle of Wight is a bit like hearing that pharmaceutical companies are closing down the production of flu vaccines just as the alert for swine flu goes from level five to full pandemic.
The comparison is useful in more ways than one. It reveals how governments can recognise and act to avert systemic risk in some areas like high finance and flu, but have blind spots or grossly inadequate responses in others, such as climate change. It’s also a useful reminder that when natural systems cross a critical threshold – for example, the number and distribution of people infected with a virulent flu virus, or the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – humanity quickly finds that it is no longer in the driving seat and able to control the direction of travel.
Last month the budget demonstrated the continuing confusion of a political system still struggling to come to terms with the inescapable parameters set by natural systems. The budget was balanced, but only in the sense that anything positive done to promote a low-carbon economy was cancelled out by other measures that will lock in fossil fuel-intensive infrastructure. Both the car and oil industry were happy recipients of budget bungs.
Grasping at the few optimistic straws still blowing around the economy, the chancellor, Alastair Darling, pointed out that the global economy still stood to double in size over the next 20 years.
What he forgot to mention, or didn’t know, is that with each “doubling” of the economy, you use as many resources as with all the previous doublings combined.
Prof Roderick Smith of the Royal Academy of Engineering at Imperial College identified these resource implications of economic doubling. Engineers, it seems, are more adept at understanding material limits. He wrote that the physical view of the economy “is governed by the laws of thermodynamics and continuity” and so, “the question of how much natural resource we have to fuel the economy, and how much energy we have to extract, process and manufacture is central to our existence”.
This year, on a conservative analysis, the UK started to live beyond its environmental means – consuming more and producing more waste than the UK itself can handle – by Easter Sunday, 12 April. This was our “ecological debt day“.
Given that both the UK and the world as a whole already use more resources and produce more waste than collectively our forests, fields, oceans and atmosphere can safely provide and absorb, where, we must ask, will the resources come from to double the size of the global economy?
Darling’s speech was to introduce the first “green budget”, a package meant to put the country on a path to sustainability. It included the world’s first legally binding carbon budget. Yet its targets to reduce emissions are roughly half of what is necessary, according to the climate research work of Prof Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Centre at Manchester University.
The budget also included roughly £1.4bn of apparently new money to reduce emissions across a range of measures for energy efficiency and renewables. That sum amounts to about 0.09% of the UK’s GDP, and compares sadly to the 20% of GDP that the International Monetary Fund estimates the UK set aside for bailing out its financial sector.
But even here the green hue is darkened by our continuing dependence on oil, coal and gas, and plans to build more runways, roads and new coal fired power stations that capture only a small proportion of their carbon emissions.
Support in the budget to extract an additional 2bn barrels of North Sea oil will produce extra greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the UK’s entire emissions in 2006, including shipping and aviation. Funds for car scrappage schemes, lacking any meaningful environmental criteria, could also see emissions rise rather than fall.
Funds for car scrappage schemes, lacking any meaningful environmental criteria, could also see emissions rise rather than fall.
Plans for electric cars may sound attractive, but you still need the clean energy to power them. More than a low-carbon vehicle strategy, if the UK is to improve its own energy security and environment, and tackle climate change, we need a low-car vehicle strategy.
Ultimately, the message sent by the budget was confusion. Setting an emissions reduction target in these circumstances is like setting someone a deadline to give up smoking, and then pushing them into a smoke-filled bar where all the walls are lined with cigarette machines.
Nature may be beautiful, but it also has a mind of its own and can take or leave humanity. That’s why we have to respect it and work within its parameters. Both flu pandemics and global warming are lethal. One difference is that if we go through the next 91 months without changing course, the climate roulette of runaway warming will not blow over. It will endure.
This article was originally published at Comment is Free.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
After climbing Hong Kong’s Cheung Kong tower in order to publicise our One Hundred Months campaign, “French Spiderman” Alain Robert is at it again, this time scrambling up the Lloyds Building in London’s financial district. Robert’s motive was to encourage G20 leaders to take action on climate change which, according to nef research, we have at most 92 months to stop.
Great coverage from CNN here:
more about "CNN Most Popular – Spiderman climbs G-20", posted with vodpod
And a piece from the BBC:
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster. He also draws cartoons for nef’s newspaper.
Every month since our One Hundred Months campaign began, we’ve been asking supporters to take action to stop climate change and to raise awareness about the cause. But Alain Robert, a.k.a. “the French Spiderman”, has – quite literally – taken our campaign to new heights. A couple of weeks ago, Alain scaled the 73-storey Cheung Kong tower in Hong Kong – with no ropes – wearing a One Hundred Months t-shirt. You can watch his extraordinary ascent here:
There’s also a photo gallery of Alain’s climbing up at the Guardian.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
When Nasa’s satellite dedicated to climate monitoring crashed last month after lift-off, even the most rational scientist must have worried it was a bad omen.
The same month brought confirmation of worse-than-expected upward trends in worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, and new research suggesting that the threat posed by even small rises in global mean temperature is greater than previously thought.
The writing also seems to be on the wall, or rather in the fast-vanishing ice, for Spain’s glaciers.
Desperate times might seem to call for desperate measures. And there is a tendency is to make a grab for the first and apparently the easiest solution to come to hand.
In this context, magic-bullet technological fixes are enjoying a renaissance. From nuclear power to GM crops, once-unpopular technologies are struggling anew for public acceptance. Some commentators associated with the green movement who were previously sceptical have voiced support, delighting some special interest groups but causing wider consternation.
Because the timeframe for action on global warming is so short, the choices we make about where we put our efforts for action are vital. Take the wrong road and the risk is that there will not be a second chance. So, are those who remain sceptical dogmatic and ideological, while those whose positions shift, open minded and rational?
Look, for example, at the issue of feeding a growing population in a warming world. For this reason alone, we are told, GM crops should be embraced. Yet recently, one of the most comprehensive scientific assessments yet undertaken on the future of farming globally, was profoundly ambiguous about the role and potential of GM crops. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) was initiated by a combination of the World Bank and various UN bodies to do farming, health, the environment and development. Their set-up was roughly analogous to the IPCC’s assessments on climate change.
The GM industry itself was involved until the findings went against them and they withdrew. The assessment concluded that GM crops may sometimes have a role, but were in many cases unpromising and unproven. A separate UN report on farming in Africa recently found that, ‘Simply applying the “industrial” agricultural models of the twentieth century into the twenty-first as a single, global solution will not serve us well.’ It went on to say specifically that ‘organic agriculture can be more conducive to food security in Africa than most conventional production systems, and that it is more likely to be sustainable in the long-term.’
What about a rational case for nuclear power as an energy fix for global warming? One problem for the new found advocates is time scale. If begun today, over the next crucial eight years and possibly significantly longer, any newly commissioned nuclear generating capacity will make no contribution at all to emissions reductions. It could, however, inadvertently push emissions up by redirecting funds away from cheaper, more efficient and quicker to implement alternatives, such as energy efficiency, conservation and renewables.
In one of a number of similar studies, the UK Sustainable Development Commission found that, even in the face of climate change, the nation’s energy needs could be met without recourse to nuclear power. In addition, it made the point that nuclear energy came with serious unsolved problems to do with long-term waste, cost, inflexibility and international security.
The British government’s own original white paper on energy was similarly dismissive of nuclear power and enthusiastic about renewables. Several studies have highlighted the so-called “voodoo economics” of the nuclear industry.
Even nuclear’s recent track record with the latest technology has been, at best, unimpressive. A Finnish nuclear plant, for example, that in 2002 was the first for a decade to be commissioned in Europe, was meant to be finished in 2009 at a cost of €3.2 billion. It’s currently €2.2 billion over budget and at least three years behind schedule.
So there are clearly other reasons why the debate on tackling climate change so often becomes transfixed by magic bullet technologies. Partly it is the impact of highly effective special interest lobbying. But there is clearly something else, more psychological going on, that possibly has a parallel with party politics.
In reaction to its years of electoral isolation, the Labour party ended up fiercely embracing and internalising the neo-liberal economic agenda it once rejected. With whole economies collapsing, it was a conversion that turned-out rather badly. Now, in a broadly comparable dynamic, some environmentalists are ditching their former analysis for faith in technologies that shine the brightest and shout the loudest.
Where climate change is concerned, the absolute urgency of action makes it even more vital not that we just do anything, but that we do the right thing.
93 months and counting …
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